Scranton Health Care Center

This facility received a strong overall score as described above, but we especially would like to point out its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded it an A in this category. Inspection grades are based on many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

Another one of this nursing home's quality category scores came in the category of short-term care. We gave them one of our more favorable scores in that area, with a score of B. Our short-term care grades are based on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a wide range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 5 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Turning to our next area, this nursing home also earned a score of B for its long-term care rating. This is an above average score in this category. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. After we finished assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 98.46154 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death health condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final area we assessed was nursing. We gave it a B- in this area. This is a fair grade in this category. Our nursing rating is based on quite a few subcategories, but the primary one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This place averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily, which is not an impressive total. Finally, our nursing scores also factor in quality-based metrics, such as preventing major falls. While this facility did not have as many nursing hours as many of the other nursing homes we looked at, it was still better than average in the area of preventing major falls.